This term Allyson Long, Dartmouth class of 2017 and a Neukom Scholar, completed gathering and editing publication place data for those entries in Stainforth’s catalog to which he added publication place names. There are about 1500 publication places that we were able to identify from the catalog data. (Stay tuned for updates on our results!) While collaborating, visualizing and analyzing the publication places, Allyson and I did what we usually do: explored interesting titles we found, searched for clues about authors who have left very small footprints in literary history, and shared what we learned with each other as we went. Sharing takes place in conversation, as we usually work together in our DH workspace, or sometimes also in messages. Our team as a whole practices this process as well, and we have been for years now. But because we traverse two institutions (Dartmouth and CU-Boulder), our sharing takes places in a variety of online forums: our Slack channel, our Stainforth Facebook page, Twitter, and sometimes email, too.

The dialogue we have, in person and in our online chats, about our data on marginalized writers is important short-form recovery work that we can share with a wider audience. This requires taking the little bit of time we need to type or link to our findings and discussion points, collect them in a common place, and publish them without feeling the need to be comprehensive and polished. I’m starting that practice for our team here. (Note: Our blog on Stainforth.colorado.edu is temporary and will be dismantled in the coming months and rebuilt in WordPress, so it would not be a good home for this thread.)

The vignettes are not meant to be fully researched mini essays, as some blog posts are. Rather, they will be short and sweet bursts that convey the recovery work we do in our Stainforth-related daily research and analyses that we usually share informally in conversation either online or in person, but that risk being forgotten if we don’t record them. Think more chat than essay: with these vignettes, we’re trying to push back on the idea that recovery work is an end-product that must be lengthy and appear in polished, peer-reviewed formats.